The South African Human Rights Commission has recently called for an inquiry into food security, and I’ve been mulling over whether there is something helpful that we, as Heart & Soil Agroecology Hub and as food scholars, could submit. My friend and researcher Donna and I have been emailing back and forth to generate some thoughts. I’d also welcome your thoughts via email if you have insights to share.

I thought one way to conceptualise food in South Africa is in terms of complicated and complex problems. This framing might also be helpful for you as you grow, harvest, eat, and generally seek to be healthy and happy.

A complicated problem is one that ultimately has an answer. How to build an aeroplane. Difficult, but knowable.

A complex problem has too many variables to ever be knowable. For example, a marriage will never be “solved.”

Food in our country— from agriculture to the way food behaves in our body— is perhaps treated as a complicated problem rather than a complex one. Something that can be solved in a long series of steps, or a unified top-down policy approach. Yet each step creates a set of infinite variables that ripple out.

I wonder if the collective journey of growing-eating-health has to be continuously lived out, rather than solved. And perhaps policy needs to support that continuous evolution.

In the living out of complex problems, there are key points of leverage. If food security as a whole is seen as a grand problem to be solved rather than a collective journey to be lived, it is difficult to make progress. If we break the problem down into tiny parts, the problem begins to be untangled. Rather than food security for millions of people, what brings one dignified job, or one set of healthy meals?

If those tiny parts overlap with key points of leverage, then perhaps we can gain momentum. So perhaps what is needed is to identify those tiny parts of a much larger problem.

Maybe there are a million small actions, in a million places, that can help us progress. One job created, or one spinach grown for our community, or one small food sharing project at a time.

I don’t mean that there shouldn’t be good national policy in place. But we don’t need to wait for it to be discovered, or uncovered, because perhaps it is primarily lived out. We can meet our national policymakers from the ground up, as they descend with policy from above. Every day we can identify tiny habits to grow things well: we can grow good food, we can share good things to eat, we can explore ways that that nourishment translates into being healthy and happy. And then we can share those with our community. And perhaps those tiny steps can eventually be mirrored in policy.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the tiny habits that help you grow, eat, or work towards health, and how you’re sharing those with your community.

Workshops

Grow our newsletter

If you are enjoying our newsletter, consider forwarding on to someone in your community. If you received this from a friend, you can sign up here